An imaginary interview

- Why do you paint ?
- For exactly the same reason I breathe.

- That's not an answer.
- There isn't any answer.

- How long hasn't there been any answer ?
- As long as I can remember.

- I mean poetry.
- So do I.

- Tell me doesn't your painting interfere with your writing ?
- Quite the contrary; they love each other dearly.

- They are very different.
- Very : one is painting and one is writing.

- But your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.
- Easy ?

- Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets, things that everybody understands.
- I never met him.

- Who ?
- Everybody.

- Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting ?
- I am.

- Pardon me?
- I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational.

- Not all painting.
- No: housepainting is representational.

- And what does a housepainter represent ?
- Ten dollars an hour.

- In other words, you don't want to be serious.
- It takes two to be serious.

- Well, let's see . . . Oh, yes, one more question : where will you live after this war is over ?
- In China; as usual.

- China ?
- Of course.

- Whereabouts in China ?
- Where a painter is a poet.

Quoted in Charles Norman, The Magic Maker; E. E. Cummings, New York, 1958, pp. 257-258;
taken from an imaginary interview in the foreword to the catalogue of Cummings' 1945 show of paintings at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery.